Is HTC about to break through the 1080p barrier for smartphones?

Once the leader in the Android stakes, HTC is very much the follower these days. And it would appear rumours that it is about to release a big-boned 5in handset along the lines of Samsung's Galaxy Note and LG's Optimus Vu simply prove the point.

But what the Korean pair don't have – and HTC's new slugger does, say the rumours – is a 1080p resolution screen.

The smartphone game has been edging ever closer to the first full HD screen device, helped in no small part by the handsets themselves just getting bigger and bigger – the aforementioned Galaxy Note is a 5.3-incher for instance, soon to be replaced by an even bigger 5.5-inch model.

However, that 1080p resolution still remains elusive, simply because cramming that many pixels onto a screen that small, while technically now possible, simply ain't affordable enough to be worth doing on a mass scale.

But that'll change one day, and if you listen to DigiTimes that day will be sometime in September/October, which is when its sources say HTC's latest baby will turn up.

Now Digi doesn't always get it right, but being based in Taiwan itself its info on HTC tends to be fairly good, so we'll not dismiss it out of hand just yet – even if the required pixel density of such a screen would be 440ppi, only just down on the 454ppi we dismissed as impossible barely six months ago.

The claimed resolution is in fact 1794 x 1080, not the standard 1920 x 1080, but that'll be after lopping off the 126 lines needed by Android 4.x's on-screen nav buttons.

Could this be the 1.7GHz quad-core beast that popped up on GLBenchmark a few weeks ago – or related to it? That device was “only” running a 720p screen, but with screen tech such a hot topic right now and demand so high for the latest high-spec panels, it wouldn't be a major surprise if it was replaced ahead of the final iteration being released.

I still think it's way too soon for mass-produced 1080p screens to be a practical reality, but I certainly don't mind being proved wrong.

Pushing 1080p to a phone screen around 5" isn't just pointless, it's putting massive massive demand on the GPU, CPU and pretty much every other part of the phone to keep up. It's not like phones have an awful lot of 1080p content, streaming 1080p video to a phone? yeah good luck with that

Hell my 7" tablet is just over 720p and it's more than sharp enough to maintain a high quality image at that size.